Quotulatiousness

November 4, 2024

Violence and sex differences

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby discusses some basic biological differences between men and women and how those differences account for much of the variance in violent behaviour:

Human anatomy fundamentals: advanced body proportions
design.tutsplus.com

(Note on usage: Sex is biological — i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce. Sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex. Gender is the cultural manifestation of sex.)

Adult human males have, on average, about twice the lean upper body mass of adult human females. This means that adult human females have, on average, 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males.

The consequence of this is that men dominate violence between adults. They dominate victims — another male is far more likely to be a physical threat or obstacle than a woman. Men even more strongly dominate perpetrators.

A Swedish study found that one per cent of the population committed almost two-thirds of all violent crimes. That one per cent was almost entirely male. Four per cent of the population committed all the violent crimes. That four percent was almost 90 per cent male1 and constituted just over seven per cent of the male population.

These patterns of behaviour do not require any “hard wired” differences by sex in human brains. They merely require that men have about twice the upper body strength of women. They represent strategic behaviour within that context.

Indeed, these results are not compatible with sex-differentiation being strongly “hard-wired” in brains by sex. The overwhelming majority of men do not commit any violent crimes, while some of the perpetrators —almost eleven per cent — were female.

What makes it even clearer that these patterns represent strategic behaviour—that is, responses grounded in (biological) constraints and capacities — is that men and women each make up about half the perpetrators of violence against children.

When women are dealing with the physically stronger sex, they are much less likely to use violence than is the physically stronger sex. When they are dealing with a systematically weaker group of Homo sapiens — children — they are as likely to be perpetrators of violence as men.

These patterns represent strategic behaviour. They represents actions responding to constraints and capacities. You get sex-differentiated patterns when the constraints are different between men and women. Our sex-differentiated biology is enough, on its own, to produce sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour.

So, even in (then) peaceful Sweden, one in 14 men are violent. That a significant proportion of men are violent predators informs female behaviour, as the systematically physically weaker sex.

Men dominate sexual violence because they are physically stronger, have penises and cannot get pregnant. That is enough to have men dominate sexual violence without any sex differentiation in the “hard-wiring” of brains at all.

We are embodied agents. How we are embodied makes a difference for our behaviour.

Women have, on average, half the lean upper body mass as men not so much because they are smaller—the average differences in height and weight are nowhere near as large. A much more significant factor is that women have a higher fat content to their body, especially their upper body.

They have a higher fat content because human brains are energy hogs, and women are structured to be able to support not just one, but two or more, energy-hog brains — i.e. babies and toddlers. More fat means more readily-available stored energy. That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins.

This goes to the other biological constraint that produces sex-differentiated behaviour. Women can get pregnant, men cannot. The risk profile differs for men and women, and not just for the risks of pregnancy and childbirth but also for child-rearing.


    1. The text of the paper and the summary table have different numbers for female offenders. As the text states that 10.9 per cent of offenders were females, which agrees with the table but not the figures given in the text, I have corrected accordingly. Fortunately, it does not affect the logic being presented.

Ujjal Dosanjh blames Justin Trudeau for the rise of Sikh extremism in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, India, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Liberal Party normally manages to avoid having any internal differences come to public attention, so having a former Liberal cabinet minister come out and directly criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rather noteworthy:

Ujjal Dosanjh speaking at the 12th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas – Engaging Diaspora Connecting Across Generation, in New Delhi on January 08, 2014.
Photo by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (GODL-India) via Wikimedia Commons.

“A silent majority of the Sikhs do not want to have anything to do with Khalistan. They just don’t speak out because they’re afraid of violence and violent repercussions,” reports Ujjal Dosanjh, as a Sikh living in Vancouver, B.C.

The call for a separate Sikh homeland in Punjab, India — to be called Khalistan — has been brewing since the 1930s, when British rule in India was nearing its end. Although the movement now has marginal support in India, it has taken wings in Canada and escalated into the present derailing of relations between two friendly Commonwealth democracies, India and Canada.

Unlike many of his Sikh peers in Canada, Ujjal — a former NDP premier of British Columbia and a former federal cabinet minister under Liberal prime minister Paul Martin — isn’t afraid to speak out. He’s been extremely vocal, especially since 1985; that’s when the bombing of Air India Flight 182 by Khalistani extremists, killing 329 people, brought the separatist movement to Canada.

Ujjal, now 78, has faced death threats from extremists but remains unwavering in his determination to convince fellow Canadians that the overwhelming majority of the nearly 800,000 Sikhs in Canada do not support the Khalistani movement. “I’d say less than five per cent, less than five per cent,” he emphasizes.

[…]

While accountability for this violence is an imperative, the purpose of my conversation with Uijal is not to sift through the evidence and intelligence. What I want to understand is how we got to this place where Canada’s Sikh population, the largest Sikh diaspora in the world, has in effect been co-opted by the Khalistanis to the point where this obscure separatist movement has become a Canadian problem.

Without hesitation, Ujjal points to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

For two reasons, Ujjal blames Trudeau: “One, he’s never really understood the vast majority of Sikhs are quite secular in their outlook, despite the fact that they go to the temple,” he says. And the second reason: “Khalistanis are not a majority, and the fact nobody speaks against them is out of fear”. Through intimidation, Ujjal elaborates, Khalistani supporters control many of the temples in Canada. And it’s Trudeau’s fault, he asserts, “that Canadians now equate Khalistanis with Sikhs, as if we are all Khalistanis if we’re Sikhs”.

Cicero 101: Life, Death & Legacy

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

MoAn Inc.
Published 31 Oct 2024

A Bit About MoAn Inc. — Trust me, the ancient world isn’t as boring as you may think. In this series, I’ll talk you through all things Cicero. I hope you guys enjoy this wonderful book as much as all us nerds do.
(more…)

QotD: Early raids on, and sieges of, fortified cities

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We’ve gone over this before, but we should also cover the objectives the attacker generally has in a siege. In practice, we want to think about assaults fitting into two categories: the raid and the siege, with these as distinct kinds of attack with different objectives. The earliest fortifications were likely to have been primarily meant to defend against raids rather than sieges as very early (Mesolithic or Neolithic) warfare seems, in as best we can tell with the very limited evidence, to have been primarily focused on using raids to force enemies to vacate territory (by making it too dangerous for them to inhabit by inflicting losses). Raids are typically all about surprise (in part because the aim of the raid, either to steal goods or inflict casualties, can be done without any intention to stick around), so fortifications designed to resist them do not need to stop the enemy, merely slow them down long enough so that they can be detected and a response made ready. […]

In contrast, the emergence of states focused on territorial control create a different set of strategic objectives which lead towards the siege as the offensive method of choice over the raid. States, with their need to control and administer territory (and the desire to get control of that territory with its farming population intact so that they can be forced to farm that land and then have their agricultural surplus extracted as taxes), aim to gain control of areas of agricultural production, in order to extract resources from them (both to enrich the elite and core of the state, but also to fund further military activity).

Thus, the goal in besieging a fortified settlement (be that, as would be likely in this early period, a fortified town or as later a castle) is generally to get control of the administrative center. Most of the economic activity prior to the industrial revolution is not in the city; rather the city’s value is that it is an economic and administrative hub. Controlling the city allows a state to control and extract from the countryside around the city, which is the real prize. Control here thus means setting up a stable civilian administration within the city which can in turn extract resources from the countryside; this may or may not require a permanent garrison of some sort, but it almost always requires the complete collapse of organized resistance in the city. Needless to say, setting up a stable civilian administration is not something one generally does by surprise, and so the siege has to aim for more durable control over the settlement. It also requires fairly complete control; if you control most of the town but, say, a group of defenders are still holding out in a citadel somewhere, that is going to make it very difficult to set up a stable administration which can extract resources.

Fortunately for potential defenders, a fortification system which can withstand a siege is almost always going to be sufficient to prevent a raid as well (because if you can’t beat it with months of preparatory work, you are certainly unlikely to be able to quickly and silently overcome it in just a few night hours except under extremely favorable conditions), though detection and observation are also very important in sieges. Nevertheless, we will actually see at various points fortification systems emerge from systems designed more to prevent the raid (or similar “surprise” assaults) rather than the siege (which is almost never delivered by surprise), so keeping both potential attacking methods in mind – the pounce-and-flee raid and the assault-and-stay siege – is going to be important.

As we are going to see, even fairly basic fortifications are going to mean that a siege attacker must either bring a large army to the target, or plan to stay at the target for a long time, or both. In a real sense, until very recently, this is what “conventional” agrarian armies were: siege delivery mechanisms. Operations in this context were mostly about resolving the difficult questions of how to get the siege (by which I mean the army that can execute the siege) to the fortified settlement (and administrative center) being targeted. Because siege-capable armies are either big or intend to stick around (or both), surprise is out of the window for these kinds of assaults, which in turn raises the possibility of being forced into a battle, either on the approach to the target or once you have laid siege to it.

It is that fact which then leads to all of the many considerations for how to win a battle, some of which we have discussed elsewhere. I do not want to get drawn off into the question of winning battles, but I do want to note here that the battle is, in this equation, a “second order” concern: merely an event which enables (or prohibits) a siege. As we’ll see, sieges are quite unpleasant things, so if a defender can not have a siege by virtue of a battle, it almost always makes sense to try that (there are some exceptions, but as a rule one does not submit to a siege if there are other choices), but the key thing here is that battles are fundamentally secondary in importance to the siege: the goal of the battle is merely to enable or prevent the siege. The siege, and the capture or non-capture of the town (with its role as an administrative center for the agricultural hinterland around it) is what matters.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.

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